The Long Zoom with Steven Johnson speaking at a seminar hosted by The Long Now Foundation.

Steven Johnson began his long zoom survey with the "prior art" of Joyce's Stephen Daedalus locating himself in himself, his neighborhood, Dublin, on out to the universe. The value of a long zoom is in identifying and employing every scale between the very large and very small, noticing how they change each other when held in the mind at the same time.

Johnson's core story (and current book) concerned London in 1854, when it was the largest city in the world and in history with 2.5 million people. London famously stank. Cess pools filled basements, slaughter houses were anywhere, garbage piled up.

Medicine at the time held that disease was caused by "miasma," foul air, noxious vapors. "All smell is disease," declared a Doctor Chadwick. The authorities decided that the way to cure the frequent cholera epidemics in London was to get rid of the bad odor - pump the sewage into the Thames, which people drank. The cholera got worse.

Johnson's goal with his book, THE GHOST MAP, was to figure out why the wrong theory of disease lingered so long, and what it took to correct it. The answer, he proposes, is in the perspective of the long zoom- Stewart Brand blog excerpt, The Long Now Foundation

Steven Johnson

English major Steven Johnson authored Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World; How We Got to Now; Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation; The Ghost Map; The Invention of Air; and Everything Bad Is Good for You. He also wrote and co-created the PBS series “How We Got To Now.“

Steven Johnson, author of The Invention of Air and The Ghost Map, recalls how Dr. John Snow and Rev. Henry Whitehead mistakenly "cracked the code" of London's 1854 cholera outbreak by mapping deaths in the area.

Click on any word within the transcript to jump to that point in the program.

Good evening, I am Stewart Brand from the Long Now Foundation. Those of us who are writers have apeculiar relationship to Steven Johnson. Basically we think that it is not fair that he he doesn't keepwriting the same book like most of us do. He does a completely new subject every year or so. And thathe can do that and master the subject that he takes on as he did with Emergence for example, as he didwith Everything Bad Is Good for You and as he has done with the new book called The Ghost Mapwhich he will talk about a little bit tonight in a much larger context. He is a polymath and he can do itin writing, he can do it presenting, as you will see. And will you please welcome Steven Johnson.Thank you Stewart, thank you. Thank you very much Stewart, thou, far too kind, I think I will justleave it at that. I don't want to disappoint anyone after that introduction. I want to thank a few peoplefirst those of you who preferred the 7.30 time, who nonetheless made it here today. I am particularlygrateful to you. Clearly the strategy going forward should be to vary the time slightly with each eventjust to throw people off and see who your really loyal customers are. And I want to thank Long Nowwhich I am a huge fan of and and folks like Stewart and Kevin and Danny and Ester and Brian andAlexander whose work I have just been admiring up close and from afar for a long time. It's a greatinstitution. This event which I have I have never seen any of these talks but I have kind of followedthem online since they come around and so it's my honor to be here as part of this.I am going to talk about this idea, the Long Zoom. Technically you are required to come up with acatch phrase, it has the long something, it's the long boom and the long tail and the long now. The longzoom and boom I think is very exciting that it rhymes like that, so it's just an extension of the wholebrand that I am very proud of. But it is some of these themes are going to be kind of worked into mynext book which right now is not actually called The Long Zoom but who knows what's going tohappen. It's still a long way off. But in some ways I am going to be looking at some of the themes thathave shown up in the last couple of books and kind of explain them in the context what I mean by thelong zoom. It's especially nicely to be asked to come here at Long Now to talk about this idea becausethis is is really not an idea about kind of thinking across the scales of time. But rather thinking moreacross different spatial scales and across different disciplines. It's the conceptual move from the fromthe very large to the very small and to being able to kind of capture all the scales in between, the stagesand and to use that framework in a useful way. That's that's what I am calling the long zoom.And I wanted to just start by wanting acknowledging that this is not a new idea. What I think isinteresting here is that it's a framework or it's a perspective that's becoming increasingly kind of currentand contemporary and accessible thanks to technology and science and in some ways to popular culturewhich I will talk about a little bit. But I thought it would be useful just to start with a little bit of priorart, to acknowledge some of the some of the things that had happened in the past, kind of some iconsof this kind of perspective. The first is this classic sequence from A Portrait of the Artist as a YoungMan where the young Stephen Dedalus kind of writes in his notebook during his class his kind ofplace in the world, Steven Dedalus Class of Elements, College, Sallins County Kildare, Ireland,Europe, the world, the universe. That's the kind of where I am and where am I in the world, long zoomperspective, how do I fit in and all these things. But one of the more recent kind of iconic visualrepresentation of this course is powers of 10 I will just show you a snippet of this is now, one about40 years old 30 years old and what's so great about this I think looking at this now is how exoticthese view was and how now it just pretty much looks like Google Earth, right. I mean this is elaboratekind of contracture to show to think about thinking across scales and how you could zoom all theway out and and now we are literally like, oh I need to do that to figure out the traffic directions tothis place, the baseball I am going to today.And so it's literally this kind of perceptive on the world is at our fingertips in a way that we could onlyreally dream about. And I also like the way that in this part of it you kind of zoom out to that visionof the whole earth that had you know seems so empowering to Stewart so many years ago and thatwas so empowering to so many people. And I think in some ways what we are talking about here is notjust what happens when you can see the whole earth in kind of one frame but what happens when youcan then move from that frame all the way in to the guys hand and the picnic blanket and then all theway into the you know, some atomic particles roaming inside that hand. That's the that's the longzoom perspective. And then just to update it, I could have shown a million examples of this. But theone I thought was the kind of the catchiest is I am just showing a part of this this is the openingsequence of Fight Club, here you go. I am not and it's no sound here, but you get the idea. It actuallystarts inside all the way inside, you know kind of synaptic firings inside Edward Norton's brain andthen slowly kind of zooms out all the way to the little beats of sweat and then all the way back to thegun, bail over the gun and then to the actual kind of opening shot you see in there.But you know every other episode of CSI has a sequence like that now too. You know this is commonplace and part of this is when you start seeing these in a sense ways of seeing, showing up in thepopular culture as just this kind of device the people use again and again the part of you goes, okay,there is something happening here. There is a certain kind of perspective or framework; in this case it'sa moving across perspectives. That's when we start thinking there is something something interestingand resonant is happening. And then the other little piece of prior art I wanted to show you were theand the graphics of this are even better than the David Fincher is this sketch that, I thought Stewarthad done but it turns out Alexander Ross have done but it's in The Clock of The Long Now book andI love - I just think this is a great sketch. And this is really about times; this is what happens if you lookacross these different scales, the point is that on these different scales they kind of move atfundamentally different speeds, fashion is just fantastic up there. That is exactly the shape of fashion.In some ways I think the one thing that I now but correct but I think slowly I am going to talk a lotabout using the long zoom perspective on culture. And I think in this case the culture is talking aboutkind of long term cultural changes and I would actually the kind of culture I am talking about iscloser I say to pop culture is probably sitting there some way between fashion and commerce andmoving at a much faster rate. There is an interesting question whether that deeper culture is alsoaccelerating as well or whether it's that kind of culture continues to exist at that slower pace. That'ssomething that I don't fully have the answer to. So what I am going to try and talk about in a sense isfreezing this, not looking at that kind of forward projection in time but kind of taking up one bigvertical slab up to the middle and looking at at a couple of case studies where I have tried to analyzesomething across all these different scales and hopefully make the case that this is a useful way of justseeing the world and talk a little bit about what happens when you see the world that way.I wanted to start with the story that's at the center of my new book "The Ghost Map". The last book Iwrote before The Ghost Map was a book about basically video games and television shows. So I wentto the next logical thing which is 19th century cholera and actually you know, one of the funny thingswhen you do this I mean Stewart kind of was alluding to it in his wonderful introduction, when youjump around from topic to topic like that, reviewers really like to make connections and they like toshow the continuity and explain what it is that connects these two books and I kept saying to peoplethey are actually different books. There is I just decided to write about something different, there isn'treally a common theme. And all these reviews of The Ghost Map we would try and kind of figure outways to relate it back to this book about video games and so there were all these kind of comicattempts where people would basically they would say, well with cholera Johnson finally has toadmit that some things are actually bad for you you know. And in another it was like you know inthe figure of John Snow the doctor railing and some medical orthodoxy of the day, Johnson clearly seesan ally in his battle against the video game theaters out there it was like, no, I don't at all, what are you talking about.So anyway but one of the things that happened was I wrote this piece about the game Spore which Iam going to talk about at the end which visitors to this event have heard much about in the past and itwas a piece about this idea of the long zoom and I realized that as I was writing the piece that thatcommon threat that united these two projects and they both were kind of anchored around this longzoom perspective. And so it turned out there was kind of a secret link between these two books. Butinterestingly I hadn't been aware of it until I actually had finished both of them. So that's what happenswhen you write books. They have a life of their own. So The Ghost Map, it's said in it's a true storyset in 1854 in London in in the late August and early September of 1854. And it's an enormouslyinteresting period in terms of the history of the cities, because London at that point was the largest cityboth in the world and the largest city the world had ever seen, it was two and a half million people.Like Paris and Paris was about you know about 1.2 or 1.3 million at this time. And it waseffectively a modern kind of industrial Victorian city living with an Elizabethan you know, kind ofpublic health infrastructure. It had no real waste management, it had no real no public health systemand people were literally kind of drowning in their own filth. I was saying to Stewart before that I havetalked about this book a little bit at talks where they were basically kind of breakfast events. And itturns out that people don't really want to hear about intestinal diseases while they are having breakfast,it's an odd day, I had not anticipated it.And but you have the situation were literally this you know the city people would have thesecesspools with human waste in their basement kind of three feet deep. And you had an enormousamount of livestock just kind of running through the city, people had cows in their attics that theywould keep their for milk and not just the horses but they were slaughter houses in the middle of thecity. And it had two kind of crucial effects that are essential to this story. The first is it was anenormously smelly city. You know any description of London from the period whether you readDickens or Mahey or Engels you know, kind of starts then with this sense of you walking and you arejust overwhelmed with the odor, I mean it was just an incredibly noxious place to live in terms of thesmell. But it had you know one catastrophic effect which was basically that the waste of theinhabitants living in the city got crossed with drinking water in a number of different ways becausethey did not understand fundamentally that it was a good idea that separates your waste from yourdrinking water. And what ended up happening is that there arose this theory which had a long kind ofpedigree called the miasma theory which basically was holding that every major disease out there thatwas kind of arising in epidemic form, most notably Cholera was caused effectively by foul air. EdwinChadwick, the kind of public health pioneer of the period testified before parliament this kind ofclassic line saying, "all smell is disease", right. Any thing you smell that's trying to kill you, basically it was the idea.And so the city institute of this incredible set of reforms and kind of beginning in a sense of the publichealth and movement and a lot of the things that we take for granted about the state intervening andthat kind of quality of life and the sanitation of the city. All these movements were initially formed todeal with the smell problem. But as it turned out the smell wasn't actually killing any one. What waskilling people most notably in the case of Cholera was in fact the drinking water contaminated withthese cholera bacteria that was coming out of people's excrement. And so the first wave of reform,there was this incredible reform in 1848 and 1849 called the Public Health Nuisances Act andwhat it basically did in the name of miasma was decree that every one had to empty out these cesspoolsin their basement and flush all that stuff into the river. And then they would drink the water from theriver, right. So you get the idea if you were modern bio-terrorist you could not come up with a betterscheme to poison the water sliver of an entire metropolitan area. And so the cholera got worse andworse and worse and effectively you know at that point almost the entire medical establishment wasbasically facing the wrong way on this issue.So the question that I really wanted to wrestle with in this book and this is really where the longzoom comes into focus is really two questions. One is how does a bad idea stay around for so long?And then when that idea finally gets overturned by a good idea, a better idea, a better idea, a correctidea, why does that happen at that point? What is it about the particular kind of configuration at thatmoment that causes the bad idea to finally die off and when you look at it with hindsight it shouldhave died off years and years before but it took it so long. And then what was the kind of the thethreshold point that that caused it to turn. And that kind of question, why do ideas prosper at a certainpoint? Why do some bad ideas prosper longer than they should? It's a question I think that you have toask and answer from the perspective of the long zoom. And the threshold point really ended uprevolving around this this week in late August in 1854, at 30 Broad Street in Soho, the densestneighborhood in all of London, a kind of an island of working class, poverty in the middle of one of themore kind of posh neighborhoods Mayfair over here to the left and on on August 28th of1854, a very popular well some of you know the story I won't go into it in too much detail, but avery popular well got contaminated with the bacteria that causes cholera. Within the space of about twoor three days the kind of most deadly kind of torrential outbreak of cholera ever to hit Londonerupted in that neighborhood. Within the phase of about 10 or 12 days the neighborhood had literallyhad been decimated, 10 percent of the population had died. And probably 50 percent would died if somany people haven't fled. It was just utter devastation, incredibly you know, just gripping tragicscenes of you know, entire families dying together in their you know, one room flats over the spaceof 24 hours and it's kind of agonizing death alone in the dark, just a horrible, horrible kind of scene.But a very dark moment turns out to have in a in a bizarre way this kind of happy ending becausethis outbreak ended up being the turning point in solving the riddle of where the cholera was comingfrom. And it produced ultimately a very famous map, where I got the title for The Ghost Map. May beyou have see it much of you probably would have seen it in Tufte's Books, those of you informationarchitects out there, it has become a kind of an icon of great, classic, early cartography and informationdesign. And it was created by John Snow. And Snow wasn't just a classic great 19th century mind livedcrucially lived in the neighborhood just just kind of down here on the edge of where the outbreaktook place. And what's interesting about Snow is when the story is told about cracking the code ofcholera and the use of this map and Snow is Snow is rolling it, it's often told in fact in the - in the firstversion that that Tufte told in his first book. He got all pretty much all of the facts exactly wrong.It's pretty amazing. And I know of course I know, it's never been corrected. He then kind of retold thestory in the next book and got the facts right. But you would think he would go back and just mentionthat he had it wrong. But basically the story is often told as this kind of triumph of information design,that Snow made this map of the outbreak and the outbreak and the map kind of pointed him to the culprit of this pump.And in part that's true and in part that's fundamentally wrong. And I want to explain why it's wrong.But just to explain the map for those of you who don't get it, the map basically is showing deaths at allthe various addresses, so these big black bars you see right around the pump in the center, those areplaces where the longest one is the residence where about 20 people died. And so it's a bar for eachdeath. And you can basically see that kind of death radiating out from that pump. It gets thinner thatyou further get out from the pump and one of the things, also that Tufte didn't mention is that a laterversion has this grey line going around which is actually kind of a map of time projected on to space.That outline is the map of the area where it was closer to walk to the Broad Street pump, in terms of theactual kind of time walking down these quirked London streets than it was to walk to any other pump.So Snow had kind of calculated all the distances and figured out you know, this is area where peoplewere likely to use this pump as opposed to these other pumps. And in fact the diseases the outbreak isreally contained almost exactly within the kind of erratic contours of that line. So it is undoubtedly avery powerful map. And it's great example kind of the power of visualization this could have been astatistical table of you know, distances from the pump, the number of deaths. It would have youknow, taken you you know, three hours to go through the data to make sense of it. Here you look atthat and you say okay, there is something wrong with that pump.So it was very powerful but Snow actually had the idea five years before he made this map. He hadcome up with the idea that cholera was in fact in the water and not in the air. In 1848-1849 hepublished extensively about it actually, had been roundly ignored by the authorities, had done a numberof studies trying to find kind of comparable statistical break down where he could show that thelikelihood of the cholera being in the water and a number of them were quite convincing but somehowthey never took hold. And he was effectively kind of sitting around waiting for something to comealong that would help him make his case. And so when he heard that all these people were dying just afew blocks from him he went straight into the belly of the beast and started knocking the doors to tryand figure out where people were getting their water. This is interesting kind of symbiotic relationshipthat Snow had to the bacteria, that he needed the bacteria that kind of destroy the neighborhood in orderthat he could save it in a sense. But he also needed help. So he came into with a theory and he endedup having a wonderful kind of partner in this investigation who was always been ignored in the tellingof this story, who is the Reverend Henry Whitehead, who was at that time about 26 years old, this ishim at the end of his life I have no idea whether he had a beard like that at that early age. And he wasjust this classic you know, Whitehead was this classic you know, local vicar, who was hanging outin the neighborhood, knew everyone, was just classic kind of connector, he would you know, he wasconstantly staying in the pubs until late at night with his parishioners, he was that kind of vicar. Andgoing over for tea and all that kind of stuff and at a certain point in the middle of the outbreak heheard word that Snow, this local doctor had developed this theory that the pump was the cause of theoutbreak. And he started investigating because he knew first hand that the pump at Broad Street had thebest water in all of Soho and so he got involved in this case too, tracking down, trying to disprove Snow's theory.And what he had that Snow didn't have, because Snow was not really kind of a social person at all, hewas brilliant mind but he was not he was not the kind of personable local vicar like figure, thatWhitehead was. So Whitehead was able to get into people houses and talk to them and interview themat length and to track down the people who would fled through his kind of extended social network.And he ended up doing a lot more of the actual kind of street level detective work than Snow did. Andso ultimately, he actually drawing upon also a lot of kind of public information that was beingmade freely available by William Farr, who was kind of the head statistician Snow, Whitehead, puttogether this overall kind of table and a few other kind of charts and eventually, overtime, convincinglypersuaded the authorities that in fact cholera was in the water. It took longer than people think. But bythe time cholera came back to London in 1866 with real severity the authorities immediately treated itas a problem with the water. They had already started building the sewer system to deal with separatingout the waste from the drinking water and they instructed everyone around this new epidemic in 1866to boil their water and that was the last time that cholera attacked the city of the London. So they wentfrom total ignorance to complete conquering of this disease in London in 12 years and were because ofthis confluence of forces.So how did this happen? What were the different kind of levels kind of coming together? Why was thebreak through here? Part of it was because Snow himself was thinking across scales, he was thinking inthis kind of long zoom perspective. So he was actively trying to find that he believed that there weresome kinds of microscopic life that was that was causing this disease. He didn't have the technologyof the day to actually see it. He was constantly analyzing the water for, but the microscopes wouldn'tlet him see it. Right about that time someone in Italy actually was discovering the cholera bacteria butSnow never heard about it, the scientific world really never heard about it for many years. So he wasnever able to see this creature but he was thinking that it was there and he was actively looking for it.So he was thinking on the level of microbes. But he was trained as a physician, this is crucial, this storyand one of things that drove him initially to the theory that it was in the water, not in the air was thatthe symptoms of the disease, the bodily symptoms of the disease looked like something that you hadingested rather than something that you have inhaled. So his physical training and kind of reading thesymptoms of the organs of these you know people who would die from the disease, that wasabsolutely crucial to his development of the theory.Then you have that kind of human skill of Whitehead himself both really the skill of Snow, hisparticular genius, his ability to do these things, his particular background that led them there and thenthe kind of human interpersonal skills that Whitehead brought to it, his ability to kind of track down allthese people to build that broader social network. And then the ability to look on the scale of theneighborhood itself, to zoom out to the perspectives so that you could see all those stuffs arrayed onthat map. Then the public ability or public accessibility of all that data that Farr was distributing in asense part of the platform for this was an open source model of government data about mortality. Youknow the government could have said, okay we are going to compile all these statistics about who isdying and what, where. But Farr had this great idea that they should make that available to everyonebecause someone may be was going to find something of interest. And without that open access to thatto the government statistics the case wouldn't have been made convincingly enough. And then Snowwas also thinking on the scales of the entire city. He did a massive map of all the different kind ofwater supply companies in London and the different cholera rates depending where they were gettingtheir water. And the very nature of the city itself caused the solution in a sense to come into place, bybeing so densely populated, by making that pattern visible in the streets and deaths on that map. Thesolution became visible in a certain way.So in the end when the question is asked you know, how did this how did Snow come to thisbreak through? How do we solve this riddle? You can't answer it convincingly unless you look at allthose different levels, right. This is the only kind of optimal view that accounts for what reallyhappened on some level. Now there is another word for this which is Consilience, an old word repopularized by E. O. Wilson a number of years ago, in a controversial book. And one of the things thatcontroversial about it on some level is the encroachment into culture. I think most of us in the roomagree that science works this way, in thinking across different scales. That at each scale there is a kindof discipline appropriate to that. And one of the ways that science works powerfully is by connectingthe scales up and down the chain, so that one scale makes predictions about the [0:26:45] ____ thatmight happen on the next scale and then you bring in the next one on that skill to verify your yourprediction. Snow's idea was I believe there is something in the water. I can't see it. But my predictionwould be that it would have this effect on a body if ingested and look I have got this evidence here thatshows that. And my prediction would be, when you get those bodies together in a neighborhood aroundan infected contaminated pump, you will see this distribution. And at each level he made a predictionthat was proved out by the subsequent data. That's we agree that's how science works and that's thekind of Consilient movement from from the very small to very large, at each step another discipline.Where the controversy comes in is when you connect those kinds of scientific disciplines to the culturaldisciplines or the disciplines of the humanities. And a lot of people, I think wrongly, believe thatWilson's argument is ultimately trying to reduce everything down to explanations that come from thesciences, when in fact I think that's not how it actually works. In fact each level in the chain has itsown autonomy; the beauty of the model is that you can connect them all. So the question is really canyou have the cultural consilience, right? Can you bring the realm of culture and ideas and personalexperience into this into this long zoom perspective? That's what I want to focus on for for instancethe second half. One example of that kind of cultural reading is is this question why miasma stayedaround so long as a theory. That's the kind of history of ideas question, why was it there, why dopeople to get stuck with it? And I think that again it's one of these cases where you need to thinkabout that cultural condition across these scales. So it was a very old idea.Hippocrates had written about you know, the importance of air in all sorts of diseases. Miasma youknow is a term that he used in some fashion and then you also of course have the ways that citieswere developed themselves kind of the lack of public health infrastructure, the lack of ability to kindof see these patterns up until this point, both caused the problem and they caused so much smell that itwas very hard to kind of override that immediate kind of sensory impact, which I will get into sense inkind of neuroscience to that. Then you have limitations in technology. It was very hard to see thisbacterium. So the technological kind of path was just not quite there up to see around miasma. Thenyou had the kind of contemporary political landscape and one of things that happened is cholera waswas more rampant in poor, most destitute neighborhoods in London because people were crowded intogether and they were living in worse conditions and so there was a great kind of political orthodoxyof the day that said, well these people, because of their moral debauched life styles have somehowbrought this disease on to themselves. And that kind of kept in place on some level. And then you havethe kind of Great man theory of History where someone like Chadwick was very influential andtestifies in front of parliament that all smells disease and people listen to him on some level that hasan impact as well. Then the other thing that I would add to this is there is a much longer and smallerelement of this as well which is the evolution of the human sensory system.So for various reasons we have evolved to be able to detect very small molecules, odors that signaldecay or as we do not have the ability to visually see bacteria. You have a glass of water that'scontaminated with you know, 100s and 1000s of bacteria, cholera bacteria and you will not see anycoloration in the water, discoloration in the water. But you can smell, you know, it smells full of humanwastes from you know, 50 feet away. And what - we also now know from our brain imaging is thatthe smell system actually evolved into a kind of alarm system in the brain. So that when we smell theseodors we have an immediate kind of revulsion reaction to them, which we do not have to a glass ofwater that contains an odorless bacteria. And so on some level people, when they would smell thesethings, they would smell them and think this has to be killing on some level. This is just how I I smellthis and my brain sends off this kind of alarm system at some level its just hard to override thatsystem that evolved in an environment where people were not around decay and vast piles of humanwastes as much as they were in modern cities. So miasma is this kind of perfect storm of all thesethings coming together working on all these different scales.So now we lets go from 19th century urban decay to SimCity. One of the things that was interestingabout the response to to Everything Bad is Good for You was the defense of popular culture anddefensive of the kind of growing complexity at popular cultures. And everyone focused in a sense onthe first half of the book which was making the argument that pop culture had gotten more complex.And you know there was a very interesting debate about that and what that meant and what effect itwas having? But I always felt that that was kind of the easy part. And that you could make that casepretty easily and the more interesting thing was to explain why it was happening. Because we have thiskind of long standing assumption that we have lived in a race to the bottom culture, everything wasgetting cruder and simpler and you know, there was the dumping down effect everywhere. It's kind ofa natural law of modern media in society. And in fact what you find is this trend towards increasedcomplexity. But that was interesting and we should have a theory of why that is happening. And so inthe second half of the book I tried to kind of develop that theory and what that is really a long zoomtheory. But to just to explain a little bit about the trend, you know, the original story the the originalkind of experience that got me on this was was playing heavy Will Wright theme to to this talk I guess fitting.Seven or eight years ago I was on a family vacation with my wife and I was she had a seven-year oldnephew, she still has a nephew, but he is older now. His name is Vaed and it was a rainy day in thisvacation and I had been playing SimCity a little bit and so I thought oh this will be fun I will load upSimCity and show it to Vaed and this will be nice and so we loaded up and I gave I gave him whatlooking back on it I think it was probably a pretty condescending tour of the game which is basicallytour of the graphics you know, so it was like, oh look Vaed there is that's the mayor's house that'swhere I live and look at the little playground, you see the kids there playing, that's neat and look at thatbig tall building there you know. And this goes on for a while and then at a certain point I I say tohim you know you know, look at this area here, I have got all these factories that are all run downand I can't seem to get this part of town to work. I mean this one is totally abandoned, I am just stuckhere. And he looks at the screen he looks you know, back at me and looks at the screen again andhe is like I think you need to lower your industrial tax rates, you know. You know it was just one ofthose moments really like, oh the world is just tilted a little bit, you know and it was one of thosethings where I thought hang on, here is this kid who is seven, who is basically picking this up, hewasn't he hadn't actually played the game before. But he was just kind of looking at the graphics andthe interface and just soaking it all. And then he was basically learning you know, urban planningyou know, principles of development and lower taxation will get more to you know, and he waspicking this all up. And if you would sat him down in an urban planning classroom. you know andtried to teach him this stuff, right, he would be asleep throughout the door in like in three seconds, he isseven years old, right. But something about this screen and the game and the whole experience was hewas learning without even realizing he was learning. He was picking up you know, a lot of information.And so I started to think well this is you know every time I looked around, people were talking abouthow all of these video games the kids were zoning out and everything is so stupid and and Ithought, oh you know, there is something really interesting is happening that nobody is talking abouthere. And and you could look at it I mean you just see in the interfaces, I mean you go like youthink about the progress from this you know, to like to like this like this is World of Warcraft, right.You know, I mean you can't a lot of you think about the interface complexity of these things now.Like what this screen from World of Warcraft like you can't even see the game, right, because theinterface is like oh, you know, that the game is the interface right. I mean somewhere back therethere is like a dragon or something like that. But you know, there is this immense data overload andthis is you know, this is legible to probably many people in this room. It's not actually legible to mebut you know you just look at all the variables going on here. And somebody sits down in front of thisand it's like right, okay, yeah I see what's going on.So to be able to you know, we went from you know, from like oh yeah yeah I got - so once I eat thepellets they turn blue and I can chase them I get it I get it how this works, you know I can figurethis out to you know, I can't even keep up with this. This is so that's the trend and part of this is ourability to kind of adapt at an ever accelerating rate to new interfaces and you know, kind ofincreasingly complex interfaces which is big part of it and the thing I have been thinking about for along time. But but there is even more to that and it doesn't just you know, it's not just a game. Youknow, I mean I think you know a show like Lost which came out actually after Everything Bad wasfinished you know, it was kind of the great you know, to me a kind of indication of the theory ofthis huge mega international hit show that is just astonishingly complex in terms of the number ofyou think about those of you who watch it you think about the number of kind of open variablesand narrative quote lines and mysteries you know, there are literally 100s and 100s things that wedon't know, I mean to the point of great annoyance. But you are still you know, they are demandingan amazing amount of just a buffer a huge buffer in the in the kind of narrative memory of the audience.And with Lost it's great because there is a control study for this too, because it's like people stranded ona desert island trying to deal with this crazy island and like you know, in television we did that oncebefore all right. So yes, you could look, so there is Gilligan and there is lock and you know, youcould tell which one is got more complex. And in fact Lost is itself a kind of a long zoom show. So ifyou think about what kinds of plotlines or you know, what are the things are relevant to the plot ofLost. They you know, really there are things up and down the chain that are central to the plot of theshow. So this is a basic kind of ontological question like are these people even alive, right. I meanthat is the thing that shows wrestling with all the time, like did they die? And this is all just a dream orif one of them is thoroughly insane and it's all his hallucination. I mean these are the kinds of questionsthat the fans are dealing with and this is huge biological question of these women, I am not going togive anything away, I promise. But this question about women on the island getting pregnant andwhat's going on and there is a soul there is an ultrasound you know, in just a couple of weeks ago.Then there is this kind of sociological things of the others and these different groups and and youknow, this whole question of kind of large group behavior and who these people are and bandscoming together. And there is an immense amount of technology in it, old technology, new technologyand a basic question of whether whether there is magic in the world it's a big question. A bigquestion that that people want to know, I mean there is a lot of technology and the question is can theseemingly supernatural things be explained.Then you have this shadowy corporate world, the Dharma initiative kind of hovering over the wholethings. You have this kind of global corporate kind of back story. And then you have the physicalgeography of the island. So you know, to ask of a show like Lost, what is you know, front andcenter and in the narrative. Where does the narrative live? Like it really truly lives on all thosedifferent levels. And if you went back to you know the most complex shows from from the 80s,even back to Hill Street Blues or something like that. You know, it would it would basically liveyou know kind of in sociology you know, somewhere between biology and sociology, like individualpeople, may be a little bit of kind of the city. A little bit of the city in that, but basically live you knowyou would never have kind of ontological issues, you never have big geographic issues. And it'sbasically kind of clustered in this kind of zone of people groups of people, the workplace, crimes.The Wire by the way is a show that structures like this too without may be ontology. But everything iselse is there. So so that's basically the you know, couple of examples of this increasing complexity.So the question is why is it happening, right. Why we are having this happening?And so I I kind of tried to identify a couple of different things. And they came from again fromdifferent disciplines. And again it's just kind of convergence of different scales that that causes thesnap. And the first thing that I came across when I was writing my book about the brain mind wideopen, is something that the brain scientist [0:39:03] ____ calls the seeking circuitry of the brain whichis kind of a subsystem in the brain that is largely kind of modified by the neurotransmitter dopaminewhich is central to many, many things about including addiction. And the seeking circuitry isbasically optimized for systems involving or experiences involving reward and exploration. Right soany anytime you are in a situation where you basically are are seeking reward and you have a kindof a reward craving feeling you have a very strong drive to explore your environment. And if youever kind of been around somebody who is going through like withdrawal from from a dopaminemodified drug, like you know, kind of cocaine or something like that that, you know, that kind ofcraving, searching your room, looking for the drug and hallucinating and all that kind of stuff is totallythe seeking circuitry going into over drive. Most of us have it in kind of normal patterns where weyou know, when we are hungry and explore for food. We can understand you know, how thisevolved. It's not that how to explain.But here is the interesting thing about it. If you accept this idea which I think most people do, that thereis this kind of reward, exploration and nexus in the brain and that it has very powerful urges and it hasvery powerful controls over tension. So when we are in that mode we really are focused and we arewilling to kind of focus on that at all cost.The prediction from this level, from the level of the brain science, is that a media form that comesalong, structured around reward and exploration is going to be very addictive. And when I when I firstcame across that I was like oh that's what it is with games, that's the structure of almost all games thatare organized formally around the words. I mean games are that is one of the basic things as you aretrying to get that prize, you are trying to get that fancy mayor's house, you are trying to get that giantgun, you are trying to get that magic pill that's in the corner. What ever it is, there is rewards andalmost all games involves some kind of explorations, some of them you know the there are wholemultiple genres that are really about exploration, where you are really moving around the worldlooking for things. And so that was part of the explanation there and peoples spent a lot of timethinking about like, how would you talk about games? What should be the kind of critical vocabulary?And I always felt that intuitively, talking about them as narrative form seems wrong. You know whenyou sit down in front of a game you are not trying to finish the story. You don't really care about thecharacters, you are not like, I wonder how this is going to turn out, result. You know you are therebecause you are like, where is that lock? I have to find that lock. I have to you know, I have got akey. I need to find the lock, right.And so on some level there is that basic sense that you were being driven into these games by this bythis kind of structure. And that's one of the reasons why a 10 year old is willing to put up with thisimmense complexity is because the structure of it is really optimized for the structure of his or herbrain, in that sense. And the other thing I have picked up from the wonderful game scholar andeducational theory scholar James Paul Gee is this principle from cognitive science and kind of learningtheory which is the regime of components. And the idea behind this is that, the space were we learn thebest and where we get into learning in kind of a flow state where we don't even realize we are learningis that space where we are challenged but not too much, right? So if it's too easy it's boring, if it's toohard, it's boring. But if it is kind of like hmmm I don't know the answer to this, but if I try, I think Ican solve it. That's the zone where people really end up learning without you know they get kind of pulled in and sucked in.And so one of the things that that has become clear to a bunch of us who looked at that is that thingslike games live permanently in that state. Unlike, say novels, which have no idea what your readingskills are and have no idea whether you are bored or not or whether you are focused or if you haveread the other literary references that they are alluding to. A game is very much aware of your skill, Imean even though even Pacman got harder as you got better, right? It's built into the kind of DNA ofthe game form. And so game sit there at that zone. They are always saying, ok you are not quite enoughto go to this next level, when you train your skills, you hone your skills a little bit more and then I willtake you up to that next level. And so people live in this regime of confidence, competence the wholetime and that's another reason why they are pulled in, and that's another reason why they can betrained to do such astoundingly over whelming things like make sense of that World of Warcraftscreen. And then I started to think well, that's what's happening even outside the game in the culture atlarge, that people who grow up playing video games and grow up learning these ever more complexinterfaces and grow up playing Zelda at eight, when you sit them down in front of a TV shows, if youput those people down in front of, you know [0:43:26] Freeze Company they are like, hell what. Youknow this is so easy. I want something you know in the regime of competence. And so a show likeLost is one of the shows and there are a bunch of other ones that are out there, realize that there is acertain generation that expects to be challenged. And in fact a show like Lost is kind of structuringitself like a game. So it's kind of a played by people that's designed to be exploited. It looks a lot likeMist in fact, in a lot of ways, - that kind of one of the most influential games in the 90s. And one ofmy favorite examples of this is this is something I found of one of the Lost fan sites after after this this thing is insane.After the just to not to give any thing away again but after the end of season one and beginning ofseason two, there is a mysterious hatch. And they blow up the hatch and they go down and the firstepisode of that season is a kind of half of it takes place inside this kind under ground player. And youknow two days after the show after the episode aired, on one of these fan sites this image showed upon a fan site and it is an annotated map of the under ground layer that some insane fan with too muchtime on his hands or her hands some how I feel like it's hands did this thing. And it's annotated. Soall of those I don't know if you can see this, but all those little the little dots have numbers on themand so you know with this this is annotated list and these are all the screen graphs that they got. Sothey sat there with the DVR or the Tevo, grabbing the frames and then figuring out the camerapositions and the little maps next to them show with the cameras and then there is a description of allthis kind of stuff and it was just like I mean and it goes on. I mean it literally goes on this is youknow just the beginning and this is I don't know, it would be equivalent of like 40 of these pages.And you know Kevin always about talks about the wonderful idea, the gift economy, I mean it's likeI love this, Sony does this and they just upload it and there you go. Here you go guys, I did a mapyou know, knock yourself out. And you know with in like you know, 20 minutes some body is likehey, great thanks, I notice one little thing. If you could just you know so.But this is you know this is like a game walk through, right? This is some body exploring the worldof Lost and trying to make sense of this. So this is incredible engagement of people being pulled intothis world and I think it's because of that exploration drive, the seeking circuitry drive and this regimeof confidence that they been trained to the point were they accept this level of complexity and theyexpect this level of engagement. And the other principle which is which is really not a principle thatcomes out of cognitive science in neuroscience it comes out of really more economics andtechnology is the market that these things are being kind of thrown into, right? So there is a justincredible speech from a number of years ago that from the 70s that the television executive gave,where he was talking about their basic mission and they were like, look there are only three channels.So we got 30 percent right out of the gate, right there, you know. And so all you know, but if we putsome thing on that's in any way objectionable people are going to turn the dial. So you get a littleconfusing people turn the dial of the other network. If we get a little too racy then people turn the dial,if we say some thing that's politically charge, people turn the dial, so what our goal here and I can'tremember if he was ABC or CBS, where he was, but he was like, our goal here is to make the leastobjectionable programming in the world. You know that's what that's how we will make our money, you know.And in fact really that was the model when every thing basically aired once and every thing was livefrom the consumer point of view, right. So you know you either have repeats in summer but youknow, there was barely anything like syndication, you know this is the 70s, there wasn't really Cable.There were no DVD's; VCR's were just come in to market. And so basically every thing you watchtelevision was a totally live medium in terms of view in the living room member seeing wasobviously it was taped or live depending on what was going on in the other end. But you just sat thereand watch and if you miss some thing it was gone. You know people weren't like oh, Starsky said thatto Hutch. I want to rewind and see exactly what he said, you know, I am not sure, I think I missed something, was there some thing in the back of the screen? No body was thinking that way about televisionbecause the technology literally kept you from doing it. And so the television got really, really simplefor an understandable reason. It had a kind of poorly trained audience who had no way to pause,rewind or watch again. But now you think about the condition we are living now. You think about thatperson with the map who built this whole thing out of being able to freeze and look at these imagesand you think about the after markets for DVD's, you think about buying shows on iTunes, you thinkabout the incredible vast fortunes made by syndicating things. You know the money is more and morein making shows that people will want to watch multiple times, right. So there is the the wholeeconomics of television has started to change. At least in this world of kind of narrative and fictiontelevision, so there is this huge you know interest now like, I want to make some thing that somebody is going to watch and then watch on syndication and then buy the DVD set. And you do that bymaking complicated things. You do that making things where it's interesting to go back and watch it over again.And so you go from least objectionable to most objectionable, I mean the most repeatable. I mean youget to most repeatable, most objectionable movies still have you know a fear factor. But for mostrepeatable you know you are in this model where you want to watch it again and again, because thereis a lot there. Every time you see it you will see something new, The Sopranos, 24, The Wire, these areall shows that are big hits. Particularly Sopranos, particularly Lost, particularly 24 but that are youknow far more complex than anything that was on television before. So in trying to understand whythis upper trend and complexity happened you can go all the way from the kind of a brain science, thekind of cognitive science, the understanding how interfaces evolved just appear technological changeof the processing power that's involved in making these games, that's obviously driving a lot of this.The new forms of distribution and then the new kind of repetition economies to drive all that. Toexplain why this trend is happening I called it in the book, [0:49:38] the sleeper curve, you have to lookat all those different scales. The question isn't kind of fully answered with out thinking that way.I want to show one one other thing that's not my work and I am sure lot of you don't know about.But it's an example again from the kind of cultural side. It's Franco Moretti's book Maps Graphs andTrees which came out a year or two ago and I think it's actually one of the most important books ofkind of cultural criticism that has come out in a long time. And what Moretti is trying to do he is atStanford and he was my old mentor in my grad school days. So there is some overlapping in our work.Moretti is trying to take in a sense this he has not called at a long zoom perspective, but he is kind ofmoving back and forth between the different scales of reading. And that basically literature has beenkind of anchored in, either that kind of close reading of looking at the text or then connecting the textmay be to the kind of cultural moment and saying how the text is kind of represents that moment insome ways. What Moretti is trying to do is kind of greatly expand the approach he has made all thesehe did a book called the Atlas of the European Novel that looked at how these novels actually movethrough space which is really interesting; a whole geographic perspective on plotlines that open up awhole new avenue. But this last one he kind of tours through a bunch of different ways, kind of levelsto zoom that you can look at. And he has done this kind of this really crazy charts like this is thehistory of kind of novelistic genres from 1740 to 1915 and its all these I don't have their titles inthere because you won't be able to read them because there are so many. But it's like you know that thekind of Newgate Prison Novels and the Silver Fork Novels and then [0:51:10] ____ Novels and thebuildings from on. And always different genres that proliferated and so basically they catalogues theactual stuff, he didn't look at the cannon. And he didn't look at kind of the anti-cannon. You looked atthe whole system of production; try and find what was the in the entire ecosystem of literature thatpeople were reading. And what was happening to that kind of the species, in that ecosystem. And whenyou zoom out to that perspective, you find a bunch of things.One, there are lot of species we didn't know about, right? I mean the diversity of the system is prettyinteresting. And two, they keep dying off at this incredible rate. So there is this very kind of strongthings we are like you know 10 or so, kind of appear as a kind of Gemini for a while. And they dieoff after about 25 years and then another 10 kind of comes into place. And there is a little variationthere but its but there is way more diversity than one would have thought. And there is way more turnover. They have these shorter life spans. And in fact he has this great term for this kind of approachwhich is distant reading, sort of close reading, its distant reading. What happens when you zoom out farenough to look at the whole system? But then, he also goes in all the way to look at devices, kind of theevolution of literary devices inside novels. So he is looking at actual kind of formal properties as theyget picked up and become standardized. So, one of my favorite examples of this is the evolution of thedetective story, kind of perfected by Conan Doyle. But before Conan Doyle kind of reached thisperfection there was a long period of kind of experimentation, where there are lots of differentapproaches to telling a detective story and many of them very comic and many of them not veryentertaining. And it's basically because people hadn't quite figured out the rules yet that were going tosatisfying to a reader. And it basically revolves around clues, right. The standard that eventually gotkind of hit upon kind of end of Sherlock Holmes and there are a couple of Sherlock Holmes storieswhere this is not true. But Conan Doyle kind of formulizes the idea that the detective story has to havedecodable clues. So the clues are actually visible to the reader in some fashion, they are kind ofmentioned or they show up and there is some form in their connection to the eventual kind ofresolution of the mystery has to be visible on some way. So there is a whole range of detective storieswhere there were no clues at all, that were published. Where people were like, yeah this guy wasmurdered and what we are going to do, we don't know. Oh my god, it was her. You know it was justlike, oh it's exiting, somebody was murdered and then they found out who it was and there was none ofthat sense of oh, I thought it might have been that, because you mentioned that there was that. And itwas Conan Doyle who finally kind of figured that out and then ever since then you know that hasbeen the standard and that's the way you tell detective stories. And if some how you come along andyou forget to mention the key thing that was staring you right in the face people say, that's not verysatisfying, you didn't play by the rules on some level.So, in this context, like Frank was going back and looking at the actually kind of evolution and theform on the level of the device. So, what I think is trying to get built here is the beginning of a kindof a long zoom theory for how literary systems work. And I think the big question here, I mean youhave you know the broad movement of societies; you have literary markets, people increasinglyfocusing on that kind of the flow books and what people were buying. You have the existingbiographical history of office which we've been doing forever in terms of literary study. We havekind of [0:54:33] narratology and now we are getting better and better thinking about the circulationand evolution of devices. But I think there is one last link there which is a logical link down to theindividual mind; what's going out in the mind of readers? So in this particular case, if you believe thatthere is a kind of evolutionary sense, this selection pressure on certain devices, that there is a lot ofexperimentation and then the market place kind of decides that they like their clues to decodable, right.Then one other things we have to explain is what is that process where by a brain is able to on onelevel have a position on a literary device without probably being conscious of the device itself, right.There aren't people saying like, that Conan Doyle was good, he has decodable clues. There is just thiskind of sense like, that was satisfying; I like that one better than the others, right. I think most kind oftheories of literary devices will have to assume that the audience is not conscious of that and yet somehow they are conscious of that. And if you get in to that realm and if your language gets murky, likesaying somehow they are unconsciously aware of it. That's when you will have to be more specific andthat's when you have to be able to say, okay you know, let's figure out how his actually works.We actually have models for this. I mean I have got a three year old son who is learning how to talkand he is going through that phase where he has he has learnt to how to you know, conjugateregular verbs and so he is making all those mistakes by taking irregular verbs that is and making allthese you know he saying things like, I bringed it, because somehow he has learned the rule that howyou you make a past tense verb. And he is executing that rule very nicely, it's producing wrongwords. So we notice it. But obviously he is not conscious about. He is not aware that, oh this isactually how you you know this is how you conjugate these things. So there may be some kind ofneuroscience basis for this that we can understand, we can understand what's actually going on in thebrain. But if it gets to the level I mean it's like that classic cartoon where they have the giant scienceequation on the chock board and all these numbers and formulas and things like that and another partbecause on here in middle it says a then a miracle occurred you know. That's why we are here. Weget you know we are really good, we are getting better and better kind of connecting these levels andthen we get to the actual brain and then it all get fussy you know, we are like well, we don't talk to those people.But we should be talking to those peoples and they should be talking to us. There is a lot to talk about,right. So the question is how do you kind of exercise this you know, what is what is the, you knowif this is an important way to think and obviously its an important way to think about how ecosystemswork, its an important way to think about how political systems work and cultural systems so if thisis something that we want to do more and more how do we kind of exercise this cognitive muscle moreand more. And it's a great question. I don't have all the answers, but it's going to be very interesting tosee what happens with Spore, Will Wright's new game because Spore as a game is the one that hasbeen the kind of most exclusively designed as kind of a long zoom thing. I mean it was inspired byPowers of Ten and a number of other things in this mode. And most you know this but I am sure,but it goes through as a game you know you kind of start with this a little little microscopic creatureand then you know, you kind of evolves into this bigger creature that you get to kind ofintelligently designed. And then you get out there and then you are kind of on the level of yourecosystem in your hunting and seeking and looking for a reward. And then you actually build a tribe Iam [0:58:01] ____ and then you start building little civilization and cities and you kind of get to thatscale and then you start thinking about planets and inter-galactic exploration, all that kind of stuff. Andso it's really it's the great kind of embodiment of this perspective in a it's a tool for this kind ofthought in Howard Reingold's great old traits.What I don't know I mean, you know I ask well about this one, you show me, demo, I have neverquite figured it out. I think the test will be how much changes on one scale effect changes on the otherscale. Because there one some level, I mean its going to be an extraordinary thing and its going to bean amazingly fun experience I am sure. But in terms of exercising the brain in this kind of consilientway which what you want to have is something where you tinker with the microscopic life and yousee changes in you city, right. That's the real kind of mind opening kind of awe inspiring thing aboutthis is that you are able to actually move back and forth between the different scales and see theeffects they have on each other and to see it all as one kind of integrated whole. I think that that thatwould be a pretty powerful tool for the mind.We will see. I come back to the Joyce quote, after he writes that a little description of himself in theworld, this is great passage where he says he reads down the list again. Then he read that, finallyfrom the bottom to the top till he came to his own name that was he and he read down the page again.What was after the universe, nothing. But was there anything after the universe to show where itstopped, before the nothing place began. It was very big to think about every thing and every where.That's kind of what I want to leave you with, it was very big, it is still very big to think about everything and every where. But it has also never been easier.Thank you very much.